Dancing in Vienna

 We’re going to the ballet! “So what?” you ask. “You go to the ballet all the time.” Here’s so what—this time we’re going to the ballet in Vienna, Austria. A few hours ago I purchased tickets to the Vienna State Ballet for Michael and me on October 27. I am over the moon.

 I haven’t mentioned the trip to Vienna since last October, when we booked it, but now it’s less than six months away and it is becoming more real than fantasy. The trip is one of many offered by The Good Life Abroad (TGLA). They provide comfortable apartments in European cities to cohorts of participants for one month stays. Each city has a coordinator who arranges a few activities each week, but people are mostly on their own.

 The reason for this astonishing trip is our upcoming 50^th wedding anniversary. We toyed with many ideas about how to celebrate. Some of them included our kids and grandkids—reunion at a resort, cruise, destination vacation—but we ultimately decided that what we truly wanted was a world class experience for ourselves. Sorry kids!

 We wanted to go to Prague—a beautiful city with an acclaimed ballet. (Our celebration had to be ballet-centric because that’s who we are.) Even though it was a whole year away, we discovered that October 2026 had already sold out. Suddenly it felt imperative to book our trip without delay. Vienna was our second choice, and we jumped on it immediately. Michael and I grinned at each other as I clicked to confirm. And yes—we still have side trips to ballet hotspots Prague and Stuttgart firmly in our sights.

 We couldn’t actually buy tickets at any of these venues at the time, though. None of them would release their fall offerings until spring. Research had told me that tickets sold out early and I had no idea how one bought a ticket to a performance on another continent in another language and another currency anyway. I’ve been stay-up-at-night worried about the ballet tickets since last October.

 I did alleviate a little anxiety by putting Copilot to work monitoring the season announcements for all three companies. Last week, it alerted me that Vienna would open fall ticket sales today. How, I asked, do I buy these tickets? It told me I could buy tickets online if I opened an account on the Vienna State Opera website. Oh, and here’s a tip: select English language and the whole process translates automatically.

 The whole process turned out to be so easy that I’m embarrassed by my months of fretting. Chalk one up for modern technology. Prague and Stuttgart still haven’t announced their fall performances, so we got our Vienna tickets for a weeknight to keep weekends open. We hope to see dancers in the other cities, too. Copilot is monitoring announcements for me.

 There’s more to our trip than ballet, of course. Vienna is so rich in history, architecture, music, and literature that I think we’ll risk exhaustion if we aren’t careful with our time. And TGLA provides enrichment through their city coordinator program.

 Every Tuesday, there will be a group lunch. Believe it or not, we’ve been promised schnitzel in a Michelin-starred restaurant! Every Wednesday, there will be a group excursion. Every Thursday, there will be a group happy hour. All of these events are included in our trip fees. We can skip things, of course, but it’s hard to imagine why we would want to.

 The rest of the time, we fend for ourselves and, I’ll admit, this is a little bit daunting. I’ve been playing around on Duolingo, but I definitely don’t speak German. This worries me, although our German friend Bruno tells us that English is widely spoken in Europe—it’s a school requirement from a young age—so we probably won’t starve or get too lost. I hope.

 Planning this trip reminds me how rarely we let our imaginations go wild. And how much joy there is in it. What is your dream destination? Who would you go with? How long would you stay? Remember, it’s a dream, so no limits!!

Ciao

The Swedish Cookie from Mexico

 My maiden name is Gustafson, a good Swedish name that my grandfather brought to the United States at the age of 12, his passage paid for by a Minnesota farmer. He worked on the farm, with room and board included, for a year to pay the fare back. He also got a suit of new clothes. He moved on after his indenture ended and finally settled in North Dakota, where he worked for the railroad.

John brought his many younger brothers and at least one sister to America from Sweden over the next several years. They settled in the Mandan, ND area. Some interesting tidbits about the Gustafson brothers appear in the rousing memoir Whoa… Yuh Sonsabitches by Edgar Potter and include drunken carousing, fighting prairie fires, and more. Apparently, the early 1900s was an exciting era.

 Although I proudly say I’m Swedish, my ancestry did not do me much good beyond the name. Grandfather married a nice German girl in 1917 and, unsurprisingly, German cooking and German traditions reigned in the household instead of Swedish. We didn’t ordinarily eat Swedish food, but one unforgettable cookie found me anyway.

 As a teenager, babysitting for a neighbor, I discovered a Swedish delight I had never heard about: Christmas rosette cookies. The rosette iron, which closely resembles a branding iron, is dipped in a runny batter and then plunged into a deep fryer until the browned rosette falls off. This took, it seemed, a matter of mere minutes.

 The crispy, crunchy rosettes were placed on a rack to cool and dusted with powdered sugar. I was hired to keep the kids safe and out of mom’s way while hot oil was in play. Besides collecting my pay—35 cents an hour—I’d get a couple of rosettes to savor on the way home. They tasted so good!

 I loved those cookies—though they weren’t exactly cookies. My mother, a DAR Methodist by upbringing, never made them. My German grandmother never made them. And after I went off to college, I never had another one. I thought about them from time to time, a fond but fading memory. Italian pizzelles are the closest I have come to a Swedish rosette.

 Until one amazing day, perusing the cookies and candy at a gas station convenience store, I chanced upon Bimbuñuelos. The picture on the package looked exactly like a Swedish rosette cookie! I immediately bought one. They were coated in granulated sugar, not powdered, but otherwise, I had found the mouthwatering, crispy, crunchy, messy treat of my teen years.

 Besides Bimbuñuelos, Bimbo Bakeries USA makes a wide variety of Mexican treats that I often see at gas stations and convenience stores. They also, as it happens, make Entenmann’s, Sara Lee, Thomas, and many other all-American bakery lines. Who knew?

 Back to the important stuff: Bimbuñuelos haven’t been readily available anywhere. Every time I go inside a gas station, I check the shelves. Ditto convenience stores. Recently, I found them in a gas station near my house and grabbed two packages. Each package contains four rosettes. Eating them requires finesse because they crack apart and drop sugar everywhere. Who cares?

 I ate one and hoarded the other because they might not be at the gas station when I went back! Last Sunday, Michael and I went on a Walmart run for kitty litter. Walking to the pet section, I noticed a stand-alone rack of Bimbo Mexican treats. There, gleaming in a metallic blue wrapper, was a multi-pack of Bimbuñuelos! Three packages in one for a price close to the gas station cost of a single package. Twelve rosettes instead of four!

 I gathered up two packages and nestled them in the top basket of my cart as if some rogue shopper might steal them from me. Back in the car, I clutched the bag in my arms protectively all the way home. When I finished the last 4-pack a week later, I went back to Walmart and bought three more. Walmart now has a Bimbuñuelos customer for life.

 How my beloved Swedish rosettes made their way to Mexico I may never know, but I don’t care—Mexico is a lot closer to me than Sweden is. I’m trying to rein in my appetite so that I don’t ever get tired of that mouthful of sweet crunch. It’s hard, though.

 What quiet yearnings—culinary or otherwise—tug at you?

When Enough is Enough

 It poured rain in my neighborhood all weekend. I’m talking about thunder cracking right overhead, so loud my cat jumped off my lap, lightning flashes that lit the backyard up like a sunny day, and rain clattering on the roof like a drum festival. I loved it.

 It helped that I had nothing important to do, no reason to go out into the weather. Yeah, we needed milk and we were looking sketchy on bread, but there were other options and neither of us would suffer food deprivation. A stormy weekend is the perfect time for a leftovers free-for-all.

 I didn’t want to go out in the rain. More than that, I wanted to get everything already in the refrigerator eaten or in the freezer before it spoiled. A big problem with a two-person family is the excess food if you cook anything major. A roast, a pan of lasagna, the Easter ham, even a 9 x 13 cake are a lot of food for two people.

 We had Alix and Adam over for Easter dinner, so four people worked on our delicious ham when it came out of the oven. It was a reasonably sized 9 to 10 lb ham and we sent a good hunk home with them, too. Still, I had enough left to make another dinner and plenty of sandwiches. How soon do you think we got tired of eating ham?

 This weekend, I knew it was do or die for the ham from a food safety point of view, so I took an hour from lazing in my recliner, reading a book, to process the remainder. I carved into it with more vigor than finesse and pulverized the resulting meat in my food processor. That yielded ground meat for ham salad: plenty for that night’s pick-up dinner, with extra tucked into the freezer for later. I put the remaining ham bone and scrappy pieces in the freezer, too. I’ll get around to them when ham sounds good again.

 I bought a cookbook for two several years ago: The Complete Cooking for Two Cookbook by America’s Test Kitchen. It is a lovely compilation of recipes, with ample, clear illustrations and offerings in all the categories from appetizers to desserts. Many of them are tagged for lower calories and fat, in case that matters. (And to whom might it not matter these days, I wonder?)

 One problem I find cooking with it is unfamiliarity. I’ve been cooking for myself and my family for 50-some years. I have a repertoire—things I know how to make, like to make, and, most importantly, like to eat. New recipes with strange ingredients in untried combinations throw me off. I have to think too hard about advance shopping and needed prep time. It is not pantry cooking. It confounds me just enough to send me back to tried and true recipes—and leftovers!!

 In addition to the Easter ham and a subsequent giant kettle of pea soup, I also cooked a small rib roast with root vegetables smothered in homemade gravy last week. I’ve had a serious craving for roast beef for a while now and I finally caved, leftovers notwithstanding. Let’s consider a rib roast. Juicy, succulent, tender: just what you want in a piece of beef. But they are too big by far.

 We got a lovely 5 lb roast recently and cut it in half—well, as close to half as one can with those rib bones in the way. Both pieces went into the freezer and when my craving struck, I took out the smallest one. When a satisfying and supposedly healthy portion of meat is 4 oz, how many servings are in a 2.5 lb roast? Too many. So our last week has consisted of two really good meals—baked ham and rib roast—and lots of leftovers. I’m so over leftovers!

 It is time to break out Cooking for Two again. That means thoughtful shopping so that we have the needed ingredients. Some things the recipes have called for that aren’t in our usual repertoire are fresh herbs, scallions, fennel (not seeds), eggplant, and orzo. I can manage these—I just have to find and buy them before it’s time to cook. Some things they use that will never be in our repertoire are tofu, jalapeño, quinoa, and kale. Eat them if you like; just leave me out of it!

 So what now? I can see that we need to go back to the Cooking for Two recipes despite discomfort with new and unfamiliar ingredients and techniques. I can’t say that cooking for two is new or unfamiliar—we’ve been empty-nested for an awfully long time. But during a weekend when I didn’t mind all the bad weather, the leftovers finally got to me. No more!!

We know what I’m tired of this week. How about you? What have you had enough of, long enough? And how are you going to change that?

 Ciao

 

The Art of the Dilettante

 I was accused, by association, of being a dilettante in 1994 at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a famous American summer writing institute founded by Robert Frost. My accuser, naming herself a “serious writer,” complained loudly one afternoon about having to share space and intellectual resources with “middle-aged dilettantes playing at being writers.”

 Dilettante stung, but I didn’t feel the need to defend myself. No, I had never been enrolled in an MFA program in creative writing and no, I hadn’t published a book. But I had written and sold feature articles to regional magazines and I had edited a national magazine with my husband for a time. I had solid writing skills and I hoped that I would be able to write a book. After all, I came to Bread Loaf to learn.

 Three decades later, I am ready to embrace the description of dilettante for myself. The word applies to the lover of an art rather than its skilled practitioner. It usually implies elegant trifling in the arts and an absence of serious commitment. Why would I claim this dubious label? A recent incident may help you understand.

 Last fall, my quilt guild offered a class for making quilted tennis shoes. I heard about it at a monthly guild meeting. “OMG,” I thought, “How much fun would that be?” I signed up for it on the spot, got the class instruction sheet and began prepping for the event. I had to make a quilt to cut up for the uppers and buy a kit with the outer and inner soles, plus all the equipment I would need.

 This wasn’t an inexpensive undertaking. Quilts are deceptively expensive to make: good fabric costs upwards of $13 a yard and they take time and skill. The shoe kit and tools set me back more than $100. The class itself added to the cost. My exciting new shoes were about to be the most expensive sneakers I had ever owned. I didn’t care.

 It feels great to say that I made the quilted tennis shoes. I had quilted fabric left over, so I decided to make a matching purse. I'd never made a purse before, but I bought a By Annie pattern (all the rage in crafting circles right now) and set my sights on something else new. When I read the pattern, it baffled me completely.

 Head spinning, I gave up on the idea until I heard that there would be a By Annie purse class at my local quilt store. I paid the fees and acquired the needed fabric and hardware for my purse project. All told, the purse cost almost $150 to make, more than I have ever paid for a purse in a store.

 I’m as proud of the quilted purse as I am of the sneakers. Will I ever make another pair of shoes or another purse? A guarded maybe is all I can muster.

 I wore the sneakers and carried the purse to the Easter service at my church yesterday. A few people noticed them and I delighted in their surprise to learn I crafted them myself. I posted a photo on Facebook and enjoyed the many lovely comments friends and family made about them.

 I appreciated the kind words, but I didn’t feel special—I just felt like myself. I am a curious person. I get intrigued by ideas and, when the opportunity happens, I like to try new things. Always have, always will. That doesn’t mean I am going to dedicate myself to it, though. I am going to be a dilettante and dabble. I have dabbled in so many things over 75 years.

 A few decades ago, I saw an article about Edward Albee teaching a playwriting class at the University of Houston. How exciting would that be, to take a class from an American icon? I wrote a play (my first) and submitted it. Lo and behold, I got in and the next year I got into his New Playwrights class, too. The play was produced at a regional theater. I got paid to write a second play that was produced on Mackinac Island. Pretty exciting stuff, but I haven’t seriously undertaken playwriting. Dilettante, right?

 I spent several years intrigued by silk ribbon embroidery and made quite a few pretty things, but that’s over now. Dilettante. I can crochet and had an afghan period, but that’s done. Dilettante. I made scarves for a while, gave away or sold many, wear some, but that’s done. Dilettante. I’ve taken a class on felting wool, pretty neat but not a keeper. Dilettante. I could go on because I am apparently endlessly curious, and I delight in trying new things. I will spare you the details.

 A few things have stuck. I’ve been making quilts since 2004 and I am pretty good at that. These days, I’m more interested in small art quilts. I learned how to make reverse appliqué quilts at a class in about 2010. I fell in love with reverse appliqué and have made (and continue to make) many, all but the very first one designed and executed by me. That’s an accomplishment I am very proud of.

 My writing is serious. I started my blog in 2004 and have posted 237 short essays, including 38 since last July. My book (may it find a publishing home soon) has been written and rewritten multiple times over 30 years and has settled into its final (please!) form at 119,020 words. That’s serious, Bread Loaf notwithstanding.

 I can be serious, but I have a lot of fun being a dilettante. Dabbling is good for the soul IMHO. As soon as another intriguing class turns up, I’m sure I’ll be off on another tangent. I’ll wear the label dilettante with the same relish I wore my new sneakers and purse on Easter.

 What dilettantish fun have you had lately? And if your answer is none, why not??

Ciao